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Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Found: Chapter Excerpt

Junior-year high-school English pays off in Crescenta Valley Park, and I'm able to identify Chapter IX from the Cliff's Notes version of The Great Gatsby.

Underlined snippets, courtesy of anonymous studier:

"....Nick is the only person besides 'Owl-Eyes' who has enough real feeling for the man to take an interest in giving him a decent burial."

"...Tom and Daisy who had fled to New York even before Gatsby was murdered, carelessly leaving the chaos they created to be straigthened out by others."

"In contrast, Nick expresses a desire to 'leave things in order' rather than just hoping they will take care of themselves."

"...but the essential element of the man, his intense spirituality, is missing."

"Mr. Gatz's copy of Gatsby's 'schedule' is especially important in that it places his son squarely in the American tradition."

And my very favorite:

"The word 'pandered' connotes the corruption of this 'last and greatest of human dreams,' the final moral that the ideal can never be realized in the gross materialism that has made a moral valley of ashes of the green freshness of America."

Huh. If Cliff's Notes is hiring, evidently all it takes is a fondness of hyperbole and extraordinary run-on-sentence skill.

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